Car Camping: The Book of Desert Adventures

Hunter Thompson meets Bill Bryson in this hilarious narrative of travels throughout the Southwest.

He's like Huckleberry Finn

Sort of.

He's a twenty-two-year-old housepainter living at his parents' house in Southern California, across a four-lane street from a gated subdivision. Now this suburban innocent is striking out on the only type of adventure he can afford: he's getting into his station wagon and going camping in the desert.

Join Mark Sundeen on his rumble-tumble journey across the Southwest, and find that the mystical home of Butch Cassidy, Chief Cochise, and Major John Wesley Powell has been transformed into something entirely strange yet unexpectedly familiar. It's a new West of low-rent trailer parks and high-dollar houseboats, of hot-springs singles scenes and homeless river guides and hapless soul-searchers, for sun-beat old-timers chewing the cud of the land and survivalist teenagers hiding out form the Man. It's a place far from the America you thought you lived in, but close enough to drive to in your car. Car Camping is a modern-day western adventure in the spirit of Mark Twain and Jack London, and you're invited to come along.

"Car Camping is a wonder of a book, a true joy to experience. Mark Sundeen's prose is sparse yet the images he creates are alive and infinite. The narrator's specialty is having adventures and we are enveloped and swept up by these adventures and become an integral part of them and we too become adventurers. Mark Sundeen is a stunningly wonderful writer. This is a book to be savored and remembered."(—Hubert Selby, Jr., author of The Willow Tree and Last Exit to Brooklyn)

"A riotous, beautiful, totally original road novel masquerading as a travel book. Sundeen's America, comprised of equal parts Gorgeous and Awful, absolutely shimmers with life. The prose is pure, wild, naive, and poetic; the characters leap off the page in their dunderheadedness and sincerity. A brilliant and auspicious debut."(—George Saunders, author of Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline)